Pictures of lily

It wasn't always obligatory to love the art of Claude Monet. In France, adoration turned to disapproval as Monet continued with his placid lily ponds throughout the First World War, tactlessly failing to paint more troubled waters. In Europe, he was regarded as a pastel-sweet decorator until the next war, although hardly anybody bothered to visit his 'Grandes Decorations', the vast water-lily cycle at the Orangerie in Paris. It took the craze for Jackson Pollock to revive his reputation in the Fifties, when critics co-opted late Monet as proto-abstract expressionism. The association did less for Monet than for Pollock, who could never quite remember if he'd seen a Monet in the first place.
It was not until the Eighties that a Monet show - any Monet show - could guarantee the massive crowds currently struggling for a brief glimpse of the beloved at the Royal Academy today. Tickets have been block-booked from Tunbridge to Tokyo and there is talk of keeping the galleries open all through the night. Monet in the Twentieth Century is expected to be the biggest show in the history of art. Can 700,000 punters possibly be wrong?

Since the 90 works in this exhibition can only be seen through gaps in the crowd - the old paradox that the greater an artist's fame, the less you can appreciate his art - the issue of his popularity is literally pressing. Why Monet? He didn't sever his ear, die young in a bar brawl, go mad through poverty, absinthe or neglect. He made so much money that he could afford to run several cars, a large staff and sizeable estate. He stayed at the Savoy in London and the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice and when he ran short of his favourite chocolates, new supplies were couriered from Paris.

If Monet's life falls short of the agony-and-ecstasy biopic the twentieth century craves, then perhaps it is the art alone, for once, which draws us. Yet there are no dramas, no stories, no people in his pictures, not even a frog to adorn his thousands of lily pads. In London, he contemplated the filthy old Thames in a fog. At Giverny, he observed blowsy dahlias, a bridge, borders, an empty path. He made hundreds of increasingly large studies of a small pond. Uneventful, innocuous, even dull.

But Monet wasn't painting the motif, which he regarded as insignificant. 'Other painters paint the bridge, the house, the boat,' he said. 'I want to paint the beauty of the air around them to grasp the intangible.' Atmosphere, vapour, air tinted with smoke: he registers the slightest nuances in this insubstantial world between him and the object. It's not the view, but the process of viewing that distinguishes his art. 'Nothing but an eye,' exclaimed Cézanne, 'but my God what an eye!'

Monet didn't always manage to get what he saw into paint. In London, he darted between his Savoy suite and a balcony at St Thomas' hospital trying to catch the fugitive light, dozens of canvases on the go at once. There are extreme results - toxic orange beams violating a haze of grey water, a purple Parliament going up in scorching sunset flames. The brushwork is histrionic, lurid, more like Munch than Monet and definitely post-impressionist. The water lilies he painted on returning to Giverny in 1903 appear extraordinarily antique by comparison.

The show is full of these astonishing contrasts. Those dainty drifts of sky blue, floating with posies, look like pretty echoes of Tiepolo or Watteau. Not so much nature as idyll, more the water-garden as eyewash. Turn a corner and the pond has become a strange mirror, reflecting a world turned upside down. Dark trees tumble headlong down the canvas, bright water rushes between them. But this dynamism and originality vanishes in Venice, where Monet simply trudges through the sites.

After Venice, his eyes began to trouble him, his wife and son died. He painted nothing for years and then - as suddenly as you see it in the RA - he burst back with monumental paintings of the lily pond. They are wild, gestural visions, in which the surface of the pond becomes a kind of canvas in its own right, brushed by branches, churned by weather, darkened to ultramarine by the undertow of subaqueous roots.
Except for a few stark willows, arms outstretched like sleepwalkers, and some jazzy wisteria dancing against cerulean blue, Monet just kept on scanning the lily pond for the rest of his days. Fauvism, cubism, futurism came and went. Marcel Duchamp exhibited his shovel. But Monet went on patiently discovering more and more ways to flood the field of vision with the evanescent, indeterminate reflection of light in water.

Monet was in his eighties when he painted the magnificent Grandes Decorations, five of which form the climax to this show. In Venice, he had talked of trying to drag the past into the present; here, he drew some way beyond. It isn't just that the phenomenal variety of brushmarks - scudding, grazing, flying, blurring - prefigures abstract art, though it does. It's that these colossal paintings seem to sidestep time.

He is no longer painting this moment, this season, these particular water lilies. Close up, these last works seem not to be made of paint, but of some soft, dry substance like fur. Walk away and the surface movement recedes like distant waves, resolving into a breathtaking stillness. It's an ocean of air in paint: the miraculous art of the floating world.

About this article

Pictures of lily

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 06.42 EST on Sunday 24 January 1999.
It was last modified at 06.42 EST on Wednesday 27 January 1999.
It was first published at 06.42 EST on Wednesday 27 January 1999.